


The Truth

by NectarineMigraine



Category: Rhett & Link
Genre: Angst, College, Internalized Homophobia, Introspection, M/M, Masturbation, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-30
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2021-01-13 06:40:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21239822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NectarineMigraine/pseuds/NectarineMigraine
Summary: Maybe it’s all been a failing on his part.  How do you decipher what a feeling means?  Is it something you’re supposed to be born with, like a kind of instinct, something you know before you know the words?  Before you even know therearewords?





	The Truth

A sound reaches through the dark and shakes Link awake.

It’s late, he can tell by the exhaustion dragging through him when he fights to focus on the bleary red digits of the clock radio. 2:47 am. 

He lies in the dark, listening to silence punctured only by the whir of the desk fan. Then it comes again: a huffing, high sound. Halting. Like catching breath, or running. It takes him a moment to place it.

In the bunk below, Rhett is having a nightmare. 

Just the idea of that, even half asleep, twists something inside. He takes a moment to breathe, to blink and shift in bed, and struggle into something resembling alertness. He waits to hear the sound again, and it’s muffled now. Into a pillow or a folded arm–something–the sound of Rhett below in such an immediate way is still something Link is acclimating to, even three months into being roommates. His whole life he’s had to imagine Rhett in his own bed across town. He’s had to close his eyes and sense the sleeping, tender static of him existing somewhere out in the damp, blue Carolina darkness.

It’s not something he’d ever bothered thinking about with anyone else. It was a feeling he’d had most of his life when it came to Rhett. A kind of focus and possessiveness that didn’t extend to his other friends. He didn’t worry intensely about them leaving him behind. He didn’t imagine himself rescuing them from drowning in the river. He wasn’t inundated with a burning feeling in his chest whenever anyone else was unhappy with him. Just Rhett.

Maybe it’s all been a failing on his part. How do you decipher what a feeling means? Is it something you’re supposed to be born with, like a kind of instinct, something you know before you know the words? Before you even know there _are_ words?

It’s that kind of feeling. Something in the marrow of his bones, ingrained into the sediment of him, like tree rings. What somebody might call a soul. 

For a long time, he’d known there was something he wanted, but not what it was. But the truth is: he knows now. He’s known for awhile.

He remembers the very moment. One moment he’d been puzzled but free, and the next, he’d understood everything and felt the chains tightening around him. Sitting outside a closed bedroom door at a high school party in senior year at Harnett Central, playing lookout for Rhett, just drunk enough to be honest with himself, for once.

For awhile, he’d just thought he’d wanted to _be_ Rhett. Rhett, the basketball star. Cocky, tall, sharp-tongued Rhett, whose Dad was a law professor at Campbell instead of a farmer, a painter, a too-busy Dad that he barely sees. Whose Mom is at home when he needs her, pouring glasses of milk at a family dinner instead of working sixty hours a week at the hospital and leaving her son to microwaved Salisbury steak and the companionship of sitcoms.

But that wasn’t it. It didn’t quite explain the way he coveted his attention. The way he hoarded it. The way he could feel himself doing everything self-consciously to impress him if he even thought he might be watching. He maybe even walked different when Rhett was around. Of course. 

But he’d never thought the word ‘love’ in relation to that feeling. Not until that moment. Sitting outside Stephanie Reutter’s closed bedroom door while Rhett was inside with her and Link’s stomach clenched tight with the sudden dread of it, his back against the hallway wall, fingers loosely circling a red solo cup full of warm Coke and something that tasted like Windex smelled. And all at once his throat had felt like it was full of broken glass.

It made sense in an unwelcome rush, the way his chest ached every time he learned that Rhett had a new girlfriend and he knew he was preparing for a month or so of being invisible. It made sense, the buried anxiety he felt at the prospect of Rhett accepting a basketball scholarship and going to college five states away, without him. Going on to be a college basketball star, an NBA star, like he deserved to be.

It made an unfair, fucked up kind of sense.

What didn’t make sense was what to do about it. Other than nothing. That was what he was able and allowed to do about it, as he understood it. A withering nausea had swamped him at the thought. 

He’s been swallowing around that throat full of broken glass every day since then. Living this sanitized, safer edition of life. A diet version. Not quite what he wants, but good enough most of the time. Other times: suffocating slowly under a bell jar of hesitation.

Tonight, listening to Rhett breathe in the bunk below in the silent dorm room provides little in terms of a balm. Because even though his fears about Rhett taking those scholarships had been averted, and here they are, together, in the dark, in a way it’s still the worst feeling in the world: pitifully pretending not to feel what he feels more every day. He can feel his anxiety mounting just at the idea of it. A kind of restless, nervous misery.

And also because Rhett’s not having a nightmare. 

Rhett’s jerking off. 

Because it’s the middle of the night, it’s dark, and it’s quiet, and Link’s been guilty of taking advantage of that himself a couple of times. And if Rhett had heard him like this, he’s never said anything.

So, extending that same courtesy, Link stays quiet. Doesn’t ask if he’s all right, like he’d been on the brink of doing.

He just lies in bed, silent. Listening, because he can’t not. 

Back when he’d realized it, senior year of high school, he’d tried to reason with himself that it wasn’t sexual. That it wasn’t like that. It was some idealized kind of love, like the philosophical kind, the way he learned in some class that the Greeks had different words to describe. He can’t remember any of those words, but he knows they exist. 

But it just wasn’t the truth. Not just because it wasn’t exactly _not_ sexual, either, and that basically put him out of the running for that high ideal kind of love he’d wanted it to be. The way it would be easier for it to be. Maybe still acceptable for it to be.

The longer he lives with the truth, the less idealized it all becomes. The more he allows himself to follow the breadcrumb trail of his thoughts in the privacy of his own mind, the more he happens upon gingerbread houses full of sinful indulgence. And he knows he’s already managed to risk the most important thing in his life just by wanting something more from it, as he is constantly wont to do.

Because when Rhett’s around, when they’re together, and alone, there are things to ignore in himself. A lurch of desire to touch. To taste. To wrap him in his arms and bury his face. To feel him breathe, and the earthly thump of his heartbeat under his cheek. A kind of closeness that’s just beyond the veil of what even best friendship affords him. 

Below, Rhett stifles a sound and it resonates through Link like a low note through a struck pipe. He curls on his side, not wanting to listen but held captive, listening with his fingernails pressing moon-shapes into his forearms, his jaw set vise-tight, eyes screwed shut at the wet, slipping sound he can just make out under the white-noise hum of the desk fan. Arousal hits like a swinging hammer.

He tries to remember the words to a prayer, any prayer, but nothing comes.

The feeling of it rakes through his body, like razor tipped nails down his back. A tornado blasting through his guts. His body responds eagerly to the sound and the idea, like being dragged through a dense, slow-moving fire. A kind of sharp hunger blossoms behind his intestines, the thrum of it eating him alive. He fights it, the way the body fights poison. His brain is useless, his entire consciousness is a livewire in his fingertips–burning to touch.

Rhett. Himself. Both, either, just…something. _Anything._

He breathes shallow and even, listening intently, focused on the labored tide of Rhett’s breath, the airy, half-smothered vocalizations of pleasure, the unmistakable, wet rhythm that itself makes Link break out in a prickling sweat, the sound growing legs and walking down his spine like a slow, sticky insect.

He could close his eyes and picture Rhett’s face: adulthood still duking it out with boyhood in his features, a line pinched between dark, prominent eyebrows over eyes squeezed shut. Mouth opening to suck in air as he works himself, lips pursed like a god blowing weather.

He can’t bring himself to picture more than that. To follow the breadcrumbs where he knows they can lead. It’s almost biblical, that fairy-tale, that parable of what happens to those who give in to avarice. His shortcomings often announce themselves on nights like this, in the dark, trapped in the moebius strip of sin and virtue, denial and want. 

The truth is: the smell of him is the foundation his whole world is bricked upon. His breath is the only thing that matters. He wants to spend the rest of his life in the blue weight of Rhett’s shadow like a quiet moss growing on a towering tree. His lips…_his lips..._

But he’ll keep quiet about it all forever. He’ll give up everything to be a best friend. To be the only thing he can be without losing everything. 

The truth is that paradise and hell are just the same thing looked at from different angles.

The frustration is so intense it’s physical, clawing through his internal organs, and the awakened lust is a painful, insistent throb nested between his thighs, legs drawn up in near-fetal position on his side in bed. He doesn’t touch. He’s too afraid. There’s a vague tremor pervading his limbs he can do nothing to calm, and he can’t tell if it’s fear or restraint, or if there’s even a difference. If it even matters.

Below, Rhett’s breath comes out hard, irregular, accompanied by a sound choked back into the folds of his throat. The shuddering breath reaches through the dark and strangles him with the inevitable conclusion of the act, Link can’t decide if he’s mournful or relieved it’s over. 

Silence closes in again, just the hum of the desktop fan pointed vaguely toward the bunks, and the liquid rush of Link’s pulse in his own ears. He hears Rhett shift below, hears him mess with sheets and pillows and, unexpectedly, climb out of bed. 

In the sallow light from the window, Link watches through his eyelashes, waits for Rhett to cross to his laundry bin before he shifts a hand down with measured slowness to press his palm flat against his aching arousal, the material of his boxers spotted damp from his own weeping in anticipation of stimulation that will not come. 

He presses, and there is a kind of relief and agony at the same time. The shock of all of this is passing, and wretchedness is taking its place. The muscles around his mouth are growing tense, taut with the dangerous need to peel back and free the scream that’s been silently building in his chest like a thunderclap.

Under his lids, his eyes are burning wet. The gripping pain in his chest is a familiar one. He turns his face slowly into his pillow, mouth frozen open around a silent sob he breathes out into the fabric. _I love you._ He mouths, giving the words no voice, but there is just a drop of incredible catharsis in giving them shape. _I love you, I love you. Please, God. Make this go away._

And the truth is just that: he loves him, and he doesn’t want it. He didn’t mean to. Didn’t ask for this. 

How much longer can he do this?

“Link?”

Also incredible, how quickly misery can morph into terror. 

“Link, you awake?”

He considers not answering, but it feels too dishonest and his larynx, his very biology betrays him before he can decide to stay silent. His voice falters on the affirmation, coming out just a sleepy, non-committal hum, and for a moment he’s certain Rhett knows everything. It’s part of that sixth sense they have for each other, the conduit link between them that has allowed the bulk of their most profound communication over the timeline of their acquaintance. Theirs is a language that doesn’t need words, and Link’s never regretted that until this moment where it’s exposed the pitiful core of him. The part that covets and lusts, and lets these obsessions sit in the deep hollow of his chest where they persist instead of starving to death the way they should, like a weed that pushes up through a crack in the concrete toward sunlight.

“Did I wake you?”

“Mmm. Dunno,” Link lies, playing up the sleep-thick croak that comes almost naturally. “Why you up, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing, nothing. Go back to sleep, buddy.”

“Mmm. You sure?”

“Yeah, man. It’s nothing.” The bunk creaks when Rhett climbs back in, tossing around for a moment before quieting down, the silence split only by the whir of the fan, and the outdoor creak of distant cricket song. 

Link lies awake, sweating in his sheets, a whole-body hunger twisting him in half, a cold ache both between his legs and deep under his breastbone. He replays those swallowed sounds of pleasure in his head on a miserable loop until the early morning sunlight slips through their bright window to gently kiss Rhett’s sleeping face—a courage that Link will never possess.


End file.
